Northam’s Medical School Yearbook Staffer: Photo ‘Not a Mix-Up’

A former yearbook staffer at Eastern Virginia Medical School said that the blackface/KKK photo on the page of Ralph Northam, the Democratic Governor of Virginia, is almost certainly him.

“In my personal knowledge and the people I knew that were working on the staff, we went through great pains to make sure that there was not a mix-up,” William Elwood told WHSV. Elwood was a page designer for the 1984 yearbook.

Northam, after first accepting responsibility and apologizing the photos Friday night, later denied that he was in the photo at a bizarre Saturday press conference. He did voluntarily admit, though, that he had worn blackface at a Michael Jackson dance competition in San Antonio, Texas.

“Each student was allowed to submit a certain number of pictures that they wanted to appear on the page with their graduation photograph,” Elwood said. “They chose their own pictures, they were submitted in a sealed envelope with their name on them, and the only time that envelope was opened was when the layout was done on their page.”

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Elwood explained that there were other blackface photos in the same yearbook, claiming that nobody “thought of that as a significant problem back then.”